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The Afghan/Burrumbeet Episode 1887-1889

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The Afghan/Burrumbeet Episode 1887-1889 Chapter 8 The Afghan/Burrumbeet episode 1887-1889 By 1863 the decline in alluvial gold recovery had so reduced the number of Chinese arriving in Victoria that the immigration issue had almost disappeared from the public agenda. Restrictions on Chinese immigration had been removed (Table 8.1). There was so little concern that statistics were not bothered with until anxieties raised by special interest groups, notably a small section of the labour movement, saw the question of Chinese immigration return to the public agenda. As late as 1885, for example, the SS Taiwan arrived in Melbourne with 150 Chinese most of whom presented naturalisation certificates and landed without causing community unrest.1 Chinese immigration reappeared as a minor political issue in the late 1870s as short but continuing recessions in the Victorian economy raised fears of unemployment. From the 1860s onwards Victorians had enjoyed living conditions said to be well above those of employees in the rest of the world.2 As Victorian industry became more specialised and urbanised trades unions were formed the leadership of the labour movement used, among other recruiting devices, the fear of an imminent Chinese threat to the employment of workers. The anti-Chinese sentiment of some unions and their leaders relied on the wider sense of unease in the community resulting from the ‘demonising’ mentioned in the previous chapter. Had anti-Chinese sentiment been driven only by a minority element in the labour movement it would not have captured support in the wider community. In a European settler community, with many divisions along ethnic, cultural and religious lines, the unions found immigration useful as a rallying point for trade union membership.3 This led to a resurgence of anti-Chinese statements as well as active steps to 1 The Daily Telegraph, 7 July 1885. 2 Butlin, N G, (1964), Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1861-1900, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 3 In 1885, a special force of police was sent to Kyneton to prevent trouble between Orangemen (Irish Protestants) and (Irish) Catholics when the Orangemen proposed to march in commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne. The Daily Telegraph, 16 July 1885. The ‘marching season’ by Protestants in Northern Ireland remains a violently divisive issue in Northern Ireland. 223 reduce immigration from the United Kingdom.4 The overall objective of the Victorian labour movement was to improve working conditions and maintain the generally high standard of living of Victorian workers. The statistical evidence shows the underlying fallacy of the anti-Chinese rhetoric. By the early 1870s the decline in Chinese immigration and in the Victorian Chinese population was obvious. Table 8.1 The Chinese Population of Victoria 1854-1921 24732 24524 17826 11950 8489 6347 4707 3262 2341 0 1854 1857 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 From Victorian and Australian Census Data 1854-1921 The Chinese population of the Colony fell from 9.6 per cent of the male population in 1857 to 2.8 percent in 1881 due to the continuing decline in new Chinese arrivals— around 40% every decade or so (Table 8.1).5 Even when there were no restrictions against Chinese immigration, i.e., 1864-1871, the rate of decline continued. One intepretation of this, mentioned previously, is that the Chinese decision to enter or leave Australia was not the result of immigration laws but of economic judgement on the best interests of the individual and his family. With the decline in alluvial gold recovery (Chapter 2) Victoria’s economy underwent wide-ranging change as more and more men moved off the diggings and into the urban areas in search of paid employment. The trend is shown in Table 8.2. The need to find jobs 4 In 1886-1887 an Australian trade union representative was sent to Britain to encourage British unionists not to emigrate to Australia. The Australian Times and Anglo-New Zealander, London, 2 February 1887. 5 Cronin, Kathryn, (1982), Colonial Casualties, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, p 140. 224 produced anxieties that were fertile ground for sectional interests in the labour movement seeking to use fear of unemployment as a recruiting ground for membership and continuing support. Although not sympathetic to the labour movement, the Victorian banker and historian, Henry Gyles Turner, referred to the growth of unions and their influence that he implies, was unparalleled in the English-speaking world at that time.6 The labour movement had a vested interest in expanding its influence in the makeup of colonial governments and their legislative programs. Underpinning the anxieties of labour was the fear Table 8.2 of low- Victoria: Urban and Rural Population Movement, 1861-1901 wage competition from Chinese immigrants that had arisen in the wake of several attempts by employers, during the late 1870s to replace European workers with From Butlin, 1964, Table 37, p 184 lower paid Chinese. 6 Turner, H G, (1904), A History of the Colony of Victoria, Vol II, London, Longmans Green, pp 278-279. 225 The concerns of the labour movement were sharpened by the Seamen’s Strike of 1878- 1879 (see Chapter 4). Before that there was the Clunes affair (1873) in Victoria and other minor incidents creating concerns about employer attitudes to labour.7 In 1879 an Intercolonial Trade Union Congress called for a heavy poll-tax on Chinese immigrants. Press reports of large arrivals (by individual ships rather than an overall increase) in Chinese immigrants in Victoria and New South Wales in the early 1880s gave the polemicists of the labour movement a new causus belli. An Intercolonial (Government) Conference held in December 1880-January 1881 reported to the British Government that: In all six Colonies a strong feeling prevails in opposition to the unrestricted introduction of Chinese, this opposition arising principally from a desire to preserve and perpetuate the British type in the various populations.8 The language appears racist but it reflects a deeper concern — the total reliance of the colonies on the economic, political, naval and military protection of the British Government One proposal raised at the Conference caught the imagination of Victorian delegates and bore fruit in 1887 (Chapter Eight). Henry Parkes suggested the use of the quarantine power and a denial of the right for naturalised Chinese to own freehold property.9 The Victorian authorities reimposed the £10 poll-tax and a ship-passenger limit of one Chinese for every 100 tons of the ships burthen. A Western Australian pattern of importing Chinese indentured labour aroused fears in the eastern colonies and in turn their reaction incensed the Western Australians.10 As Table 8.3 shows, the proportion of Chinese working as miners in Victoria fell steadily. The Chinese poulation was divided between those who moved into the category of ‘farmers’ (mostly market gardeners) or ‘other’ who found work as domestics, furniture workers, laundry workers, etc. There was no evidence that European workers were being 7 Small, Jerome, (n.d), ‘Reconsidering White Australia. Class and racism in the 1873 Clunes Riot’. http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/raceriots.htm 8 Price, Charles, (1974), The Great White Walls are Built, Canberra, Australian National University Press, p 168-169. 9 Parkes, Henry, New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 13 July 1881, cited in Rubenstein, Kim, (2000), ‘Citizenship and the Centenary—Inclusion and Exclusion in 20th Century Australia’, Melbourne University Law Review, No 24; (December 2000). 10 Premier Duncan Gillies to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, The Daily Telegraph, 17 April 1888. 226 displaced by the Chinese.11 Table 8.3 Chinese Working Population 1861-1891 From Census of Victoria, 1861-1891 An anti-Chinese movement was led by the Victorian furnishing trades unions soon to amalgamate as the United Furnishing Trades Union. The movement avoided evidentiary argument and centred their polemics on the kind of demonising mentioned in the previous chapter.12, The union stated over and over that Chinese competition offered a serious and continuing threat to union members. The reports of the factory inspectors appointed under the Victorian Shops and Factories Act, 1896 show that at no time did the Chinese ever constitute more than a third of the total number of furniture employees and Chinese furniture manufacturing was Farmers Farmers Other Farmers Miners Other Other Miners Other Miners Miners Farmers 1861 1871 1881 1891 concentrated in the the manufacture of the cheapest lines that did not offer serious competition to European tradesmen. In the laundry industry, leaving aside the uncounted number of individuals, usually widows, who took in washing, the average number of Chinese workers was always less than half the number of European laundry employees.13 The statistics used to create Table 8.3 show the major categories of employees in the four 1861-1891 Victorian Censuses. The overall shift from mining into other occupations is striking. 11 Price, Charles, (1974), The Great White Walls are Built, Canberra, Australian National University Press, p 171. 12 Ibid. 13 Papers Presented to Parliament, Victoria Parliamentary Papers 1904, Vol 2, Report of Inspectors under the Factories and Shops Acts. 227 Table 8.4 Major Categories of Chinese Employment 1861-1891 22000 21000 20000 19000 18000 17000 16000 15000 14000 13000 12000 11000 10000 9000 1861 1871 1881 1891 8000 7000 6000 5000 1861 1871 1881 1891 4000 1861 1871 1881 1891 3000 1861 1871 1881 1891 1861 1871 1881 1891 1861 1871 1881 1891 1861 1871 1881 1891 2000 1000 Market Shops/Services Farm Employees Housing/Furniture Domestic Work Food Sales Mining 0 Gardeners Constructed from Table 9 pp 144-145 in Cronin 1982. None of the objections to the Chinese were new or true. The anti-Chinese attitudes of the furniture unions in particular, and more generally the labour movement, were declared in the lead-up to the Melbourne Exhibition of 1880 prompting this comment by Cheong and his co-authors of the 1879 Chinese Question: Chinamen are told:— You must not work in Australian ships or in Australian factories; you must not earn a livelihood by hawking or by handicrafts in these colonies.
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